


Sidelong

by Anonymous



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alcohol, Dubious Consent, M/M, Tony Stark Has Issues, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:22:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22623997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “Tony, Tony, Tony. What are we gonna do with you, kid?”Tony turns his head towards the voice. He knows that voice. That voice doesn’t belong here, in an underground dance club in Berlin of all places.
Relationships: Obadiah Stane/Tony Stark, Peter Parker/Tony Stark
Comments: 12
Kudos: 90
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5, is this thing (an)on?





	Sidelong

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LearnedFoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LearnedFoot/gifts).



> Your letter had such delicious Obie/Tony prompts, I couldn't help but try my hand at one. I hope you like it!

~*~

The pulse of the music runs across Tony’s fingertips, straight through his ribcage, and everything around him is shining and bright. He thinks he can feel it even in the very back of his eyelids, giving everything around him a sort of fuzzy glow.

There’s someone leaning up against him, a hand running through his hair. It feels awesome. The awesome thing stops though, coinciding with a sudden shift in the couch cushions; someone sitting down heavily on his other side.

“Tony, Tony, Tony. What are we gonna do with you, kid?”

Tony turns his head towards the voice. He knows that voice. That voice doesn’t belong here, in an underground dance club in Berlin of all places. He looks back in the other direction, but whoever had been on his other side must have vacated the premises post haste. That sucks. 

He turns back to Obie.

“What’re you doing here?”

Obie raises an eyebrow at him. “What do you think I’m doing here?”

Tony rolls his eyes. Legal adult or no, he sort of figured it was only a matter of time before the board sent someone to collect Tony from what he’s been jokingly referring to as his take on a Grand Tour. It was a simple plan, really: he wanted to get shitfaced in every city where Howard Stark's been publicly honored. He was only on his third city so far.

There were a lot of them.

“You finished your drink? Finish your drink, then let’s go,” Obie says.

But Tony’s glass already runneth empty, and Obie ignores his very convincing argument about why he grab one more before they leave. He finds himself ushered out through the back door, a car already waiting in a tiny side-alley to spirit them away. Tony slumps down in his seat, vaguely tries to work out the likelihood that Obie will let him grab some of scotch that’s probably stocked in the limo’s wet bar.

“Need you to come back, Tony. R and D doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing with half the stuff you were playing around with, and the other half - ”

Obie doesn’t have to finish that sentence. Because yeah, Stark Industries made great efforts to only hire the best and brightest, but there was only one Howard Stark.

Emphasis on the ‘was.’ 

“So the board has their panties in a twist?” Tony asks.

“You think?” Obie answers, but strangely enough - he doesn’t look mad. He actually looks sort of amused. Obie cocks an eyebrow in Tony’s direction. “You have fun?”

Tony turns to the window. “No.”

He feels Obie’s hand settle on his knee, squeezing once before pulling away. “You will. It gets better, I promise. Just give it time.”

As they pull up to the hotel, Tony raises an imaginary glass, offering up one last silent toast to his mom for the night.

~*~

Peter Parker is fourteen, lives with his aunt, and lost his uncle less than a year ago. 

He’s also superhumanly strong and spends his spare time running down purse snatchers and saving kittens from trees, all in what looks to Tony like a pair of glorified pajamas. Tony spits a mouthful of mediocre walnut date loaf into the kid’s trash can and takes a moment to look around the tiny bedroom.

“Retro tech, huh? Thrift store? Salvation Army?”

“Uh. The garbage, actually,” the kid says.

Given the pajamas, Tony can’t exactly pretend he’s surprised. 

The kid has a shitty poker face and possibly the second most obvious hiding place outside of shoving his suit under his mattress with (what Tony assumes must be) his porn mags.

The webbing though - that’s a surprise. Fast-setting enough to hold several times his full bodyweight within a few milliseconds of exposure to air, and completely dissolved within a few hours, like it was never there at all. How a fourteen-year old kid managed to design and manufacture something like that in what Tony has to assume is a high school chemistry lab is pretty damn impressive. Tony has a brief flash of what might be possible if he were to set the kid loose in one of the SI labs, all the tools and resources in the world at his fingertips to play with. The kid was too smart to be stuck in a high school robotics lab, surely. 

He shakes his head; that’s not why he’s here. 

It’s an intriguing thought, for sure, but Tony’s got bigger issues to deal with right now, and Peter, with his super-strength and proven non-lethal means of attack means he’s uniquely positioned to help Tony out in that department.

"When you can do the things that I can and you don't, and then the bad things happen, they happen because of you," the kid says, and Tony can hear Cap in every damn word.

Peter may be bright, but he's young. Impressionable. Tony gives him the broadest possible strokes of what's going on and whisks the kid off to Berlin without a second thought, homework and better judgment be damned.

~*~

“Nervous?”

“I’ve literally been doing bullshit like this since I was what - fourteen? Fifteen?”

“True, but not as leader of the company. I watched your father do this for twenty years, hell, I’ve done it myself - trust me, it’s different when it’s all on you.”

Obie’s right.

Tony hates that he’s right, but is equally glad that Obie _knows_ that he’s right. Stepping up as the CEO of a multibillion dollar company wasn’t exactly a small thing. If it was just R&D stuff Tony would be golden, that was his bread and butter, but being the CEO meant a lot more than that - a fact which Obie is quick to remind him. It’s the kind of stuff Tony always took for granted, how effortlessly Howard seemed to handle everything - at least as far as Stark Industries went. They were some big shoes to fill, loath as Tony is to admit it.

“It’s not, though,” Tony is quick to point out. “It’s not all on me, ‘cause we’re a team, right?”

“Of course we are, kid.”

Obie sets his hands on Tony’s shoulders, squeezing them as Tony shuffles through his notecards one final time. He doesn’t even need the notecards to be honest, it’s just something to do with his hands. He tucks them away in his inner suit jacket pocket, not wanting to look fidgety. On stage, the announcer is just finishing up her introduction.

“Gimme a smile,” Obie prods, thumbs digging into the meat of Tony’s shoulders.

Tony locks down his own doubts and offers up his best cocky grin. 

Obie grins back at him. “That’s my boy.”

He squeezes Tony’s shoulders one last time before letting go, fixes his tie and then slaps him on the back to propel him up onto the stage.

The thing is, Tony doesn’t actually hate it: the expectant hush of the crowd hanging on his every word, the subsequent roar of applause when he finally gives them what they want - the big reveal, the new piece of tech, the shiniest and most expensive toy in the box. 

It’s all just showmanship, and Tony has taught himself to be great at that. 

~*~

It’s early afternoon on a school day, a fleet of small boats and helicopters is circling around a limping-but-mercifully-still afloat ferry, and Peter Parker is sitting slumped on top of the ventilation building on Governors Island. 

Instead of, you know, safe at school like he fucking well should be.

It isn’t the kid’s fault, not really - he knows that. 

Tony’d handed over a million-dollar superhero suit to a kid who still needed a signed permission slip to go on field trips. There was a reason fourteen- ( _I’m fifteen_ , Peter insists, as if that makes the least bit of difference) -year olds weren’t generally encouraged to swing through the city at top speed chasing down bad guys.

This. This was that reason.

Peter is smart, and well-meaning, and almost painfully earnest in his desire to impress, all of which Tony can appreciate. But ‘smart’ doesn’t mean he’s ready for everything the world is bound to throw at him, if he keeps this up. 

Knowing Peter is smart doesn’t override the growing dread in the pit of Tony’s stomach, because he knows the kid isn’t going to stop. Whether he’s prepared for it or not, he’s just going to keep throwing himself into the fire, over and over again, until one day he’s not lucky enough to make it back out unscathed.

Peter isn’t ready for this. Tony is only going to get the kid killed, shoving him out onto that big bad world stage before he’s ready.

“I don't have any other clothes,” Peter says. Quiet. Resigned, at least momentarily.

“Okay, we'll sort that out.”

~*~

Obie looks at Tony over the top of his glass of whiskey, considering.

“Tuscany, huh? Not exactly one of your usual haunts.”

“Little romantic getaway. Seems like the kind of thing people do,” Tony says.

“The problem with Tuscany is there’s nothing to _do_ in Tuscany.” Obie waves his glass in a dismissive arc. “You can drink Italian wine anywhere, if she likes that sort of thing.”

“I thought that was point? Get away, someplace quiet where neither of you have anything better to do and spend time together, right?”

At least, Sophia had seemed to like the idea when Tony had pitched it.

“For some people, sure.”

“Not your style?” Tony asks, amused, and Obie laughs. They both know damn well it’s not. 

Tony can count on one hand the number of ‘quiet little vacations’ the man has taken in the decades they’ve known each other. He figures it still counts as counting on one hand if the answer is a big damn goose egg. 

Obie does vacation the same way he does everything else; big, loud, and almost always with some ulterior motive in mind - wining and dining some DOD bigwig or a new member of the Armed Services committee. Hell, sometimes all it’s about is getting a few splash pages of coverage in the tabloids; Obie stretched out on a lounger with a drink in one hand and a couple of pretty young models arranged around him like setpieces in the middle distance.

Tony has taken plenty of those kinds of vacations himself, over the years.

 _Like it or not, you and I are the face of this company,_ Obie has told him, repeatedly. _And that face has to maintain a certain image. People don’t want to buy weapons from a nice guy, Tony. They want to buy weapons from the guy who always comes out on top._

_And guys like us? We always come out on top._

“I have to be in Singapore next week, for that thing,” Obie says to him now, off-hand. “You weren’t planning on taking the jet, were you?”

He had, actually, but Obie’s thing was probably more important. “I’ll get a charter, no big deal.”

“Ah no, come on. You should have it for your trip. You don’t want to bring your girl on a charter for that kind of thing, it starts the whole thing off on the wrong foot.”

“I wasn’t planning on renting a schoolbus with wings, Obie. Gulfstream just came out with a brand new - ”

“Tony, Tony, listen - it’s not about that. The G5 could have the best interior in the world, but nothing is going to have the same impact as taking her on a plane with _your_ name stamped across the fuselage.”

He’s probably right. 

“I’ll take the charter, you take the jet,” Obie says with an air of finality. 

“You know, you’ve told me multiple times the jet is only meant for company business.”

“Good thing you and I _are_ the company then, huh?”

~*~

Tony isn’t sure how it happens, exactly, but he ends up pushing back the trip with Sophia. 

Obie takes the jet to Singapore, and Tony ends up joining him. They have a hell of a time in some new hotel on Marina Bay that Tony barely remembers the name of, and by the time Tony makes it back stateside in time to leave for Tuscany, Sophia has left him not one, but two ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ voicemails.

He tries calling her. She doesn’t answer. A week later Obie takes him to Madrid, where Tony determinedly screws his way through the local population of dark-eyed, dark-haired women that bear a passing resemblance to Sophia.

“It’s easier this way,” Obie tells him. “No expectations, no apologies for missing dinner because work came up. You know the kind of life we lead, Tony; it’s all work and it’s all play, you can’t expect someone else to want to sign onto that, not long term.”

“Dad did it,” Tony says. 

It’s not really an objection, more like bland statement of fact.

“Your father was a hell of man, and your mother was one hell of a woman. You can’t expect that kind of thing to just happen, kid. The odds of something like that working out are astronomical.”

Tony knows.

~*~

Peter has had the suit back for nearly three years by the time Tony throws him a party for his high school graduation. 

It’s meant to be a small thing, at least at first, but then the rest of the team seems to take the party as an excuse for an impromptu reunion, which Peter is entirely too awestruck over to think of raising any kind of objection. It’s a bit of a novelty for all of them; being together in a room with no potential world-ending threat bearing down on their heads. 

Also, barely an hour into the night Peter is slightly drunk, which is entertaining as hell. His cheeks are flushed pink and his eyes are a little too bright, like he can barely contain his enthusiasm.

“Heard you and your friends are taking a little post-graduation trip?” Tony asks.

The kid nods like it takes every last ounce of his coordination. “Yeah! Road trip all the way down the East Coast. We’re gonna do like, the Mutter Museum, the Smithsonian, and there’s some weird hollow-earth cult thing MJ wants to visit in Florida, I guess? Um, and a bunch of other stuff too along the way.”

Tony doesn’t doubt it. 

“Should be fun.”

“We’re pretty stoked,” Peter says, grinning happily and ducking his head like he’s embarrassed to admit it. 

“When do you head out?”

“Tomorrow. Supposed to be in the morning but I’m pretty sure Ned isn’t going to be awake until like, at least eleven. MJ’s probably gonna be super mad at both of us, but like, we’re taking Ned’s car, so...”

“So, driver makes the rules.”

“Kinda, yeah.”

Tony could give the kid a car. Hell, Tony could hire the kid a driver and a damn plane to take him and his friends wherever they wanted to go - the East Coast seemed like such a narrow trajectory when there was a whole wide world to explore. 

He realizes he doesn’t actually know if the kid’s ever been anywhere else, outside of Berlin and DC. 

But this is exactly the sort of thing Peter should be doing, Tony knows. Spending time with his friends, stepping out into the world at his own pace, on his own terms. So instead of offering the kid a jet, or any number of the other insane thoughts that flash through his head in that moment, he simply asks: 

“Back in time for college in the fall?”

“That’s the plan. Um, a little sooner than that, actually, ‘cause like, MJ and I both need to work for a few weeks to earn some cash before we leave for school.”

“Come work for me when you get back,” Tony offers, somewhat on a whim.

Peter looks up at him, definitely inebriated but still plenty sharp enough to catch that Tony is only half-joking.

“My hours are kinda limited,” the kid says. “I’ve got this other thing I do that takes up most nights and weekends.”

“Hmm, sounds like you might have a tough time finding a seasonal job with those scheduling limitations. Whereas I can offer you flexible hours and a competitive wage, along with a few other off-the-books type benefits.”

Peter’s lips twitch, like he’s about to call a bluff on the whole pseudo-negotiation. But he manages to rein it in enough to prompt - 

“How competitive?”

“Pretty competitive. I mean, look who you’re talking to.”

“I accept,” Peter says, sticking out his hand with as serious an expression as he must be able to muster.

They shake on it. 

“Good deal, kid. We’ll turn you into a CEO yet.”

Peter’s nose wrinkles.

“Yeah, I don’t see that happening.”

Tony doesn’t either, not really. The thought of a grown-up Peter trussed up in a suit and tie attending endless board meetings makes him die a little inside. 

The party runs fairly late, although by the end there’s only a few stragglers remaining - Cap and Sam in the midst of what sounds like a friendly but heated debate over something or other, Nat and Rhodey exchanging stories that probably shouldn’t be shared within earshot of impressionable young superheroes. Which of course means that Pete is right there in the middle of it, listening in rapt attention.

“Mr. Stark! Have you heard this one?” Peter calls out, waving him over when he notices Tony looking in his direction.

“Heard it? I was probably there,” Tony says, walking over to the group. “Rhodes, are you corrupting the youth again?”

“Sorry, are you mad that I might be corrupting the youth or are you mad that I was doing it without you?” Rhodey replies.

“Almost definitely the latter,” Natasha says.

“I’m not being corrupted,” Peter chimes in. “Like, if anyone was wondering.”

“We weren’t,” Natasha assures him with a teasing smile. Peter goes a little pink in the face again in response, which Tony probably shouldn’t be enjoying as much as he is. He settles a hand on Pete’s shoulder.

“Unfortunately for you, your opinion doesn’t count on this one.”

Peter makes a vaguely annoyed sound.

“Although speaking of that, do you have some kind of curfew I’m supposed to be enforcing here? I don’t know how fifteen year olds work these days.”

“I’m eighteen.”

“Isn’t your birthday in August, kid?” Rhodey asks.

“I’m _practically_ eighteen,” Peter clarifies.

“Uh huh, sure, okay.”

The remaining guests filter out a little while after that, except for Peter, who’s staying over because Tony is fairly certain May will find a way to murder him if he were send her nephew home on the subway in his current state, superpowers notwithstanding. Actually, superpowers very much so withstanding, possibly, given that Peter accidentally manages to rip the dishwasher door straight off its hinges trying to open it to put his glass inside.

Peter stares down at the door in his hand, glass still poised upside-down in the other.

“Um.”

Tony bites his cheek to stop himself from laughing. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m so sorry! I haven’t done anything like that since -”

“Seriously, don’t worry about it,” Tony cuts him off. “I never liked that dishwasher anyway.”

Peter puts his glass inside, and then awkwardly and very cautiously props the door back against the opening. “I can fix it. Just uh - maybe not right now,” he says.

“Yeah, let’s not. How about we get you into bed before you destroy anything else there, He-Man?”

He guides Peter up the stairs and down the hall toward the guest rooms, pausing outside the door of the first one on the left.

“Right. Drink some water, and if you feel like you’re gonna puke, try to aim for non-absorbent surfaces - or better yet, the toilet. Got it?”

Peter nods solemnly. “I’m not gonna puke,” he says, seeming to take the suggestion as a personal offense.

“Of course not. But if you do - ”

“I won’t. I’ve been drunk before, Mr. Stark.”

Something about the way he says it sticks in Tony’s head. There’s something there, something that vaguely annoys Tony; that someone else got to see Peter giggling and sloppy and also maybe casually destroying kitchen appliances with his bare hands first. He’s honestly not sure if it’s a territorial thing or a safety thing that bothers him more. 

If it’s the latter, that’s fine. That’s perfectly acceptable, to be worried that the kid might be running around Queens without full control of super special mutant powers. Tony’s run the numbers. The kid could tear down a building by accident, if he were distracted or uninhibited enough. Tony’s pretty sure he would’ve found out soon enough if anything like that had happened though, which just leaves the former. Which is almost definitely not fine.

But that’s a problem for another night, when Peter isn’t standing there blinking up at him with a faint smile on his face, like he’s waiting for something. The door is open, but Peter isn’t making any move to go into the room. Tony wonders if the kid actually needs to prodded inside, or if he’ll just stand out here all night if Tony doesn’t usher him along.

Tony reaches out, one hand on Peter’s arm to guide him inside, but before he can process what’s happening, Peter has leaned in and pressed a kiss to his lips.

Tony freezes, his hand going tight around the kid’s arm.

Peter pulls away.

“Sorry. Did I - I thought earlier, you were kind of… uh.”

“Flirting?”

Peter’s lips press into a thin line, but the expression on his face is answer enough. _Yes_ , that’s exactly what he thought.

“Trust me kid, if I was flirting with you, you’d know it.”

“You joked about off-the-books benefits earlier, and then like a minute ago you said something about getting me into bed,” Peter points out.

Tony doesn’t remember anything quite so explicit as that; he’s done a pretty good job keeping a lid on some of his less than virtuous impulses when it comes to Peter. He’s been careful.

Possibly not careful enough, if the way Peter is looking up at him now is any indication.

“Exactly how many wine coolers have you had tonight, kid?”

“Zero. I had a rum and coke and a couple beers - oh, and tequila shot with Mr. Wilson and Ms. Romanov, because they said they were pretty sure I needed to know how to do one of those before I got to college.”

Great. Perfect. 

“Goodnight, kid.”

Peter calls after him, but there’s just enough of a waver in his voice that Tony knows it would be a terrible idea to turn back.

~*~

Tony raises an eyebrow at the pizza box sitting on his coffee table. 

“That bad?”

“I was in New York, I brought back a pie. Why do you always assume it’s bad news?”

“Uh huh.”

“Okay, fine. I might need you to make a trip. Just a quick one, though. Some of the military brass are getting a little antsy - ”

“- about the price tag on their newest toy?” Tony interrupts, reaching down to grab a slice of pizza from the box. “Wow, I never would’ve guessed. They do realize no one else has our repulsor tech, right? Like, not even close. ”

Obie leans back on the couch, looking amused. Right. Preaching to the choir. Tony shoves a bite of pizza in his mouth, wiping grease off his chin with the back of his hand.

“They know. They want the missiles, they just also want someone to give them an excuse to say they need them. You know how it is.”

Tony nods. He knows. He’ll make the trip - it’ll be a quick one, three days away from the lab at most. Annoying, but worth it for the fuck-all giant procurement order that’s sure to come.

He grabs a couple beers out of the fridge and he and Obie eat their way through the pizza, shooting the shit. Obie shucks his suit jacket, pulls off his tie, stretching one arm out along the back of the couch. It’s an old trick; one he knows will work, regardless of how long it’s been since the last time.

Tony swallows another mouthful of beer, wiping his mouth on an actual napkin this time and licking his lips.

“You working on anything good?” Obie asks, unaffected.

“Couple things. Nothing ready to go to print, yet.”

“The Jericho’s a real thing of beauty, kid. You did good.”

Tony bristles at the diminutive; it’s been a long damn time since he was a kid, and yet, Obie has a way of making him feel nineteen all over again; cut adrift in a wide world with an empire’s worth of expectations and no roadmap. Annoyed as he is by the nickname, the praise still leaves him warm.

“It’s an anvil,” he says. “The repulsors could do more. A lot more, if we -”

“An anvil’s exactly what they need out there. You could design the best precision scalpel in the world, it’s never gonna have the impact of one of these babies. Best thing any of us can do is give ‘em a weapon they only have fire once.”

“As long as they buy a lot more than one,” Tony adds.

Obie laughs, raising his beer in acknowledgement, and Tony doesn’t bother trying to hide the way his eyes automatically track the movement.

~*~

Peter doesn’t go to bed, because of course he doesn’t. Tony finds the kid in the kitchen, poking around in the fridge nearly an hour later. His head whips around when he hears Tony walk into the room.

“Oh, uh. Sorry?”

“Is there even any food in there?” Tony asks. 

He honestly can’t remember. He’d had food delivered for the party, but he’s fairly certain the assembled crew of superpowered metabolisms had probably decimated that. 

“Not really,” Peter answers, shouldering the fridge door closed behind him.

“Take a seat. Hey Fri? Get us a pizza.”

Peter’s eyes go wide. “Does anyone even deliver this late?”

Tony doesn’t bother justifying that with an answer.

“C’mon,” Tony says instead, tipping his head towards the living room. “Tell me more about this trip.”

He doesn’t actually give a shit about the trip, but the way Peter lights up when Tony asks about it is worth listening to a bit of excited teenage rambling. Enough to ignore Tony’s distaste for whatever rustbucket car the kid’s friend will doubtless be driving.

The pizza arrives thirty minutes later, handed across the threshold by a slightly baffled delivery driver. Tony shoves a healthy tip into her hand and shuts the door before she has a chance to get a good look around the penthouse, or see Peter sitting on the couch in his PJs, his hair ruffled by a failed attempt at sleep.

Whatever this might look like, it isn’t.

~*~

Obie takes the glass from Tony’s hand before they stop out of the car, which annoys Tony but is forgotten quickly enough when they make it upstairs - because it’s a nice suite, sure, but it’s _one_ suite.

“What, are we roomies?” Tony snipes.

“Calm down, Tony. There’s another bedroom down the hall. I would’ve brought you back to your own hotel but apparently the entire Berlin press corp knows your room number.”

Tony flops down on the couch.

“I hope you realize sharing your room means sharing your minibar. Pony up,” he says, waggling his fingers at Obie and the bar.

“You don’t think maybe you’ve had enough?”

Tony rolls his eyes, but persists in waggling his fingers towards the bar.

“Fine.”

Wow. That was easier than expected. Tony lets his arm drop to the couch, watching as Obie pours out a couple fingers of scotch in two glasses. The man hands Tony a glass and sits down next to him, taking a sip before setting his glass down to loosen his tie and roll up his sleeves.

Tony watches in silence, his drink nearly forgotten in his hand. 

Obie is solid in a way that Tony can’t help but envy. Obie hadn’t missed a step when Tony’s parents had died. Tony has been in the process of falling apart in spectacular fashion ever since that night, but not Obie. He’d stepped up with a certain kind of unshakeable confidence that he could and would rise to the challenge. It’s both comforting and infuriating in equal measure. 

Tony resists the sudden urge to toss the scotch back in Obie’s face, just to see what he would do.

“Tony...” Obie drags out the last vowel, goading.

Tony takes a sip of his drink. It’s good. Well, to be fair, Tony has no idea what the hell makes for a good scotch, but it doesn’t burn that much going down and Tony figures that’s probably a point in its favor.

He can’t stop thinking about how good it’d felt, earlier. The hand in his hair, the hand on his knee. Obie has really nice large hands. Tony wonders if there’s a way he can get that hand back on him, warm and grounding. He’s not sure if something about his expression makes it super obvious or if Obie just knows him that well, because in the next moment Obie is reaching across the back of the couch, his arm looped over Tony’s shoulders, hand pressed flat against Tony’s chest.

Tony sighs into the touch, leaning back.

“Are you about to fall asleep on me?” Obie asks, taunting.

“No,” Tony says.

“Good boy.”

Tony’s thighs clench and he shifts on the couch, desperate to find a position that won’t make his body’s response to those words quite so painfully obvious, but it’s no use trying to hide it from Obie, who notices instantly.

“I’m sorry. I interrupted your night, didn’t I?”

“Little bit, yeah.”

“Well that’s too bad. There’ll be plenty of other nights though, kid.”

Tony doesn’t give a fuck about other nights right now. He’s drunk and he’s horny, and he feels like he wants to crawl out of his own skin with the need to get close to someone. Not just someone - someone who knows him. Someone who isn’t about to run straight to the tabloids in the morning.

“Tonight isn’t over yet,” Tony says.

Obie looks at him, considering. “Yeah? It’s pretty late.”

“It’s not that late.”

“Well, what would you suggest?”

Instead of answering, Tony cranes his neck up to plant a kiss on Obie’s mouth. To his unending humiliation, Obie laughs against his lips.

Tony pulls away.

“No, come on. Hey," Obie says. "If that’s what you want, we can do that.”

His throat is dry, and it takes a minute to process what Obie is offering.

“Really?”

“Of course. You and me, we’re a team, understand? There’s nothing we can’t do if we stick together.”

Tony nods. 

Obie pulls him in, forehead to forehead. “But how about you let me take the lead for now, huh?”

Tony is so enthralled by the idea of actually getting what he wants that he’s pretty sure he would agree to anything right now. He doesn’t care.

Kissing is good. Kissing is great, actually, but way better once Tony manages to get both of their shirts off. Pants are a little more complicated, requiring coordination and balance that Tony doesn’t have in his current state. Obie laughs at him, and Tony couldn’t give less of a shit, because in the next second he’s squeezing Tony’s ass, his tongue snaking into Tony’s mouth. 

Tony processes the rest of the night in what feels like stop motion animation. One moment they’re in the living room, standing next to the couch with their clothes in scatters around them, the next Tony is on his hands and knees on the bed, slick fingers working him open as he pushes back, desperate for more.

Tony feels his face shoved into the pillow, his entire body rocking back and forth with the force of Obie’s thrusts. 

It’s good. It’s so good Tony can't manage to find even the tiniest ounce of shame at how desperately he begs for it; not that night, and not any of nights after. 

At least, not until much, much later.

~*~

Peter must have been starving, because he dives into the pizza with gusto. Tony has a slice himself, but he isn’t starving the way the kid seems to be - Tony wonders briefly if he should’ve had Friday order more than one. Thankfully Peter seems to slow down somewhere around the third slice, and by his fourth he’s leaning back against the couch with one arm slung across his stomach.

He looks comfortable enough, although his lips are pinched into a thin line. He glances over at Tony then away again, aware he’s being watched.

“I’m sorry. About earlier,” Peter says, his eyes set on the edge of the coffee table. “I didn’t mean to - um.”

“Make a drunken pass at me? Don’t worry about it," he says, dismissively. "Practically a right of passage.”

“I wasn’t drunk,” Peter mutters.

“No, the dishwasher just attacked you and you rightly defended yourself.”

That gets Peter to push himself upright, squaring his shoulders and looking Tony directly in the eye. 

“I _wasn’t_ drunk. I was nervous,” he insists. “And I am gonna fix that, by the way.”

“You don’t have to fix it.”

Tony truly doesn’t give a shit about the dishwasher, but it’s far easier to respond to that than it is to touch anything else Peter has said in the five minutes.

“I do though, because I’m leaving tomorrow and I don’t really know how long I’m gonna be gone, but I know if I don’t say anything tonight then I'm probably -”

Tony buries his face in his hands. “Kid, stop.”

“No. And stop calling me ‘kid.’ I haven’t been a kid in a long time.”

Peter is half-right, maybe. He’s certainly more mature than Tony himself was at that age, but almost-eighteen was a far cry from being old enough to know better. Tony has several decades on the kid and clearly he still doesn’t, otherwise turning him down would be a hell of a lot easier right now.

“I’m on the team now,” Peter says. “If I’m old enough to risk my life to fight aliens and bad guys and whatever else, then I’m old enough for this. If you don’t want me then that’s - that’s okay, but I’m pretty sure you do.”

Tony reaches out, gives into the temptation to run his hand through Peter’s mess of hair. 

“If that’s what you want. If you’re sure.”

Peter turns his head in response, tucking his cheek into the palm of Tony’s hand. 

It doesn’t have to be a bad thing, surely. Whatever other blame Tony is prepared to assume for how badly this could end, at the very least he can make damn certain that it won’t be something Peter looks back on in shame.

Regret? Probably.

But not shame.

~*~


End file.
